Best way to prevent zombie processes

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Cecil Westerhof <Cecil at decebal.nl>:

> It works. What I find kind of strange because
>     https://docs.python.org/2/library/signal.html

You should not rely on Python documentation on Linux system specifics.
The wait(2) manual page states:

    POSIX.1-2001 specifies that if the disposition of SIGCHLD is set to
    SIG_IGN or the SA_NOCLDWAIT flag is set for SIGCHLD (see
    sigaction(2)), then children that terminate do not become zombies
    and a call to wait() or waitpid() will block until all children have
    terminated, and then fail with errno set to ECHILD. (The original
    POSIX standard left the behavior of setting SIGCHLD to SIG_IGN
    unspecified. Note that even though the default disposition of
    SIGCHLD is "ignore", explicitly setting the disposition to SIG_IGN
    results in different treatment of zombie process children.)


Marko